Academic Productivity

Is there a simple explanation for why some people pick up demanding activities (such a career in science) while some others are happy watching television most of their spare time?

Maybe it’s as simple as this: boredom is aversive to everyone, but people differ on when they get so bored they need to do something about it or their head will explode. Let’s call this the boredom threshold. So let’s play with the naive theory that people with a low boredom threshold do science (or art, or some other complex, demanding activities). And let’s assume that mainstream jobs (i. e. those that apply existing knowledge instead of living at the bleeding edge) can get away doing the same things over and over again. This is a caricature, but bear with me.  

Some job descriptions value resistance to boredom. Of course, that’s not in the contract, but it’s implicit. And the humility it takes to take such a job is not only accepted, but encouraged in Western society. It’s almost getting to a point where the trait could suffer natural selection (if our standards lasted a few million years ). There are more boring jobs than interesting jobs (i.e., interesting jobs are in the ‘long tail’ of a power-law distribution). People willing to accept a boring job have thus more chances of being employed. More so, most jobs have some boring part, so a caricature of a person that would only take non-boring jobs and would quit as soon as something boring comes up would be kicked out of the gene pool.

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How can you take advantage of the current craze about social media?

The fact is that many people use social media to  build a powerful reputation In any Industry. This article will focus on professional social sites (i.e., linkedIn, biznik) and not on the more leisure-based social sites (mySpace, facebook). Having said that, do not discard the more traditional forums and blogs; making posts in these can get you the same benefits than professional social sites, and they are often more targeted.

1 - Benefits are not immediate

Social networks will look like a supreme waste of time in the short term; the benefits are cumulative and slow. Andy Erickson (linkedIn) says:

For me, it’s sort of like having done all the preparation work for an emergency (fire drills in school, CPR certification) and then being grateful that you did when you finally need it.

This is also true for other forms of name-branding and visibility such as blogging. Having the attention of some people is a great currency that you never know when you are going to need.

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I always wondered how people see the academic world from outside. How do we gauge the interest of the general public on what academics have to say (on average)? One easy way to look at this question is to see the how often people will read an article that has the word ‘academic’ on it.

A proxy on what people read nowadays is digg.com. And the tool to see how often people digg academic posts is now available in Dan Zarella’s blog. Given a keyword, the tool will return data on the average number of links accumulated by stories popular on Digg that mentioned that keyword. This is done with 2007 data.

Well, behold what happens when you enter “academic”:

And compare it to what you get when you type “productivity”:

Why is this important? Well, on average, a single digg increases traffic by 0.10%. So a story that gets 3,000 diggs results in an increase in total traffic to the referring site by 300%.

So, from now on we are a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog

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We are proud to announce the birth of Academic Productivity 2.0. Over the last months we have been brainstorming on how to improve the blog and we are happy to announce a number of important news.

New look

We have redesigned the blog and created a new logo: a delicate metaphor on how the academia transforms raw ideas into… more mundane, consumable things.

It took quite a lot of work to get the current look working (and we ended up making very conservative decisions!). Load times should have improved as we have removed some plugins that were slowing things down.

Open contributions

We thought it’s ok to write our own ramblings, but we’d like to read yours too.

Academic Productivity 2.0 introduces an open registration system (default role: “Contributor”). This will allow to open up the blog for contributions from our readers. Other blogs have done this, and since we have been receiving a lot of valuable suggestions from our readers, we think it’s time to create a community of contributors. If you have ideas/hacks you want to share, sign up as a contributor or log in < ?php wp_loginout(); ?>(see link on the right side).

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Seth Godin is one of the luminaries of marketing. He posted something thought-provoking recently on his blog:

What if I told you about an industry which:

1. Indebts most of its customers, sometimes for twenty or more years a person
2. Not only consumes most of four years of its customer’s time, but impacts its prospects for years before even interacting with them
3. Enjoys extremely strong brand preferences between competitors and has virtually no successful generic substitutes
4. Dramatically alters relations within a family, often for generations
5. Doesn’t do it on purpose

…and

…according to most of the studies I’ve seen, there’s very little or no difference in the efficacy of one competitor vs. another.

The industry is, unsurprisingly, US undergraduate college. Seth is a high-profile person, both on and off-line. So is Paul Graham.

Another industry that seems to commit the same sins is of course, the MBA. And this, too, has its critics: Josh Kaufman reasoned that paying around $150000 for the credential to manage a business wasn’t as compelling as it might seem when you can collect most of the books on the area and read them yourself.

But how am I going to get my skills certified, even if I acquire them by myself? How am I going to convince the human resources department of my employer to hire me? Well, easy: by doing admirable things. Instead of presenting a piece of paper, present your crowning achievement. Then going to college changes meaning completely. People may go into a classroom not to get a grade (a piece of the paper that is a ticket for a job), but to learn things that enable them to build better solutions to problems. Under this view, as Graham says, a job is “so-twentieth century”.

It seems that in recent times many people are independently proclaiming that “the emperor has no clothes”.

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Kevin from CiteULike wrote in to let us know that they introduced a number of new features. Beside some new user-oriented features (e.g. an editable profile and the possibility to create a blog), the most interesting additions are those that extend group functionality.

Using an online reference manager to share a reference pool among members of a team or project is a brilliant idea, but the previous implementation of groups in CiteULike was pretty poor. The recent upgrade addresses some issues of the previous version and introduces interesting new functionality that should make team-based use of a reference pool snappier and more usable.

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How can a music playing program be a time saver? What does this have to do with productivity? Well, background music prevents me from getting bored and drift into distractions. Music may shield you from noises and attention-grabbing events around you. I think music helps me reaching flow when writing/programming.

I will assume that at some point you have taken the time to rip your music collection into your HD, and that you have decent tags. Changing CDs or vinyl is just too distracting. If your tags are a mess, there are lots of tutorials on the web to get them under control. It’ll be worth the effort. At the end of this post, I’ll show you what could be the fastest method with the least human intervention.

(Note: I have talked about how managing music and academic paper collections are similar here; See also ‘noise for academics‘ by Shane).

The problem is that having background music has a cost.

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From Mark J. Perry’s blog, I just learned that the average UAW worker with a high school degree earns 57.6% more compensation than the average university professor with a Ph.D. Considering that there are plenty of academic positions that do not enjoy the average salary mentioned in the blog post, this is something to worry about. Average Postdoc salaries according to the NSF are nowhere closer to this figure, and you have to add the uncertainty of these positions (they are always short-term) and mobility demands (expect to move to a different university sooner or later). And of course, academic work longer hours and suffer a lot more psychological stress than car factory workers.

Where did things go this wrong? Do our markets demand cars, and not knowledge? Is education so unimportant in our current economy? These statistics are borderline insulting, no matter how you try to justify them.

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The Chronicle has an interesting piece: “Is Your Spouse Hurting Your Career?”:

in some “mixed marriages,” with no malice or sabotage intended, the nonacademic partner’s behavior or ideas can undermine or even cripple the scholar’s career — because of mutual ignorance and mistaken assumptions. And in those cases where the relationship is failing, the academic’s work can be but one collateral casualty of a wider war.

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Today, while googling for “tenure rat race”, I found Jonathan I. Katz’s page: “Don’t Become a Scientist!“. I find his honesty devastating:

Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover the mysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learn how the world works? Forget it!

Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you are smart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as an undergraduate. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation, you will have to deal with the real world. That means that you should not even consider going to graduate school in science. Do something else instead: medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or something else which appeals to you.

Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from following a career path which was successful for me? Because times have changed (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in science it is in the expectation of spending your working life doing scientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed, probably when it is too late to choose another career.

I think he is right in many levels. But let’s concentrate just on the simplest, easiest to measure: money.

If we academics do the computations proposed in Figuring Out Exactly How Much Your Time Is Worth [The Simple Dollar], we may be in for a surprise.

Basically, you determine your true hourly wage by subtracting all of your work-related expenses from your salary, then calculating the hours you devote to work each year (including commute and other time-sinks) and dividing your remaining salary by your total hours.

Since we work silly hours, the actual pay is quite ridiculous. Of course, one has to factor in the liberty to think, flexible hours etc.

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The Chronicle (newspaper) has a good website with a very active forum. I have been monitoring it for a while, and I can certainly say that there are very informative threads in there. It seems to be a very good place to get privileged hard-to-find information about subtle topics such as what is a good job offer, whether a particular department should be red-flagged because of internal fights, or how to negotiate a start-up package. This forum may well be old news for many, but it was an interesting discovery for me so I’ll just post about it just in case it’s useful for anyone.

They have a section on “balancing work and life”. I wonder how many similar forums centered around a profession have one. Scary.

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Have you used wikis as a mean of collaborative work with colleagues? Have you been frustrated by the current implementation, thinking that some ideas are just hard to put into wiki format? Gerhard Fischer, at the University of colorado, Boulder, has received a grant to improve existing wiki technologies for academic use. From the article:

The proposed research will create environments that go beyond existing Wikis (being primarily focused on hypertext) to permit the integration (not just attachment) of other forms of media ranging from movies and animations, to sharing of datasets, to the creation and utilization of social network information to support community interaction, to conceptual mind-mapping media.

I’m really interested in how several researchers collaborate on the same topic. Currently, most people I know simply email back and forth a word document with ‘track changes’ enabled (which can get messy after a few iterations). Not many people write papers using a ‘wikified’ document, and this could partly be just because hypertext (and all the symplified wiki markup languages) are not appropriate for the task. I wonder if the new additions would change current practices much (I’m really curious about the integrated mindmapping part).

Link to O’Reilly Radar > NSF Looking for a Better Wiki

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One other thing that hasn’t changed . . . There are still people who make the transition into a new job quickly and relatively painlessly, and other people with similar experience/credentials who go months or years without these same nibbles. I credit the difference to two things: 1) How the person felt about their expectations of success, and 2) How far they strayed from their computer.

Dave Jensen, Moderator at scienceCareers  has this interesting post on how bombarding people with new communication channels (e-mails etc) won’t work better than face-to-face or any other traditional means. Networking seems to be fashionable, with books like Ferrazi’s Never eat alone getting really popular. Is it really the case that academics do no not pay much attention to email networking? Do you really need to get away of your computer to keep your contacts alive? I find this surprising considering how multi-authored papers have grown with the use/abuse of email. But of course, looking for a job may be a different thing. Is really a phone call better?

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Delliwin, and the mac alternative DelliMac, are a chimera: tags and folder structure at the same time. If you thought that tags are nice, but missed the more traditional dropbox-style way of accessing your bookmarks when stored in a browser, this is for you. If you are off-line at times, and wish you had your del.icio.us plugins with you, this is a solution. If you never thought there is a point in having your bookmarks in del.icio.us and never used your account much, this may change that behavior.

I’m sure Dario and Shane will write more about the advantages of social bookmarks; in any case, there are resources that you use and are not convenient to keep in the more ‘academic’ format of a reference manager.

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